Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

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Solutions
portunity exists at the technical layer, mainstream users balk—they are eager to
have someone else solve the underlying problem, which they perceive as technical
rather than social.
The second difference is that many content-layer enterprises have developed
technical tools to support collective participation, augmenting an individualistic
ethos with community mechanisms. 5 In the Internet and PC security space,
on the other hand, there have been few tools available to tap the power of
groups to, say, distinguish good code from bad. Instead, dealing with bad code
has been left either to individual users who are ill-positioned to, say, decipher
whether a Web site’s digital certificate is properly signed and validated, or to
Internet security firms that try to sort out good code from bad according to a
one-size-fits-all standard. Such a defense still cannot easily sift bad gray-zone
software that is not a virus but still causes user regret—spyware, for instance—
from unusual but beneficial code. As with the most direct forms of regulation,
this solution is both under- and overinclusive.
These two differences point to two approaches that might save the generative
spirit of the Net, or at least keep it alive for another interval. The first is to
reconfigure and strengthen the Net’s experimentalist architecture to make it fit
better with its now-mainstream home. The second is to create and demonstrate
the tools and practices by which relevant people and institutions can help secure
the Net themselves instead of waiting for someone else to do it.
Befitting the conception of generative systems as works in progress that
muddle through on the procrastination principle, the concrete ideas spawned
by these solutions are a bit of a grab bag. They are evocative suggestions that
show the kinds of processes that can work rather than a simple, elegant patch.
Silver bullets belong to the realm of the appliance. Yet as with many of the Internet’s
advances, some of these hodge-podge solutions can be developed and
deployed to make a difference without major investment—and with luck, they
will be. The most significant barriers to adoption are, first, a wide failure to realize
the extent of the problem and the costs of inaction; second, a collective action
problem, exacerbated by the Internet’s modular design, thanks to which
no single existing group of actors who appreciates the problem sees it as its own
responsibility; and third, a too-easily cultivated sense among Internet users that
the system is supposed to work like any other consumer device.